Herman Cain: Brainwashing

Herman Cain said most blacks are dumb. He should know. He’s talking about his own people.

Cain actually used the word “brainwashed”. That makes me think of Frank Sinatra tracking a robotic Laurence Harvey in the “Manchurian Candidate”. We all know that brainwashers are our enemy. In the film, Russian and Chinese intelligence agents and a Commie-loving traitor, Laurence Harvey’s mother, terrifically overplayed by Angela Lansbury, will stop at nothing to attain their evil ends.

Could there be a good brainwasher? Some corporation, or some government, or some alien offers eternal happiness right here on earth, in the form of pills, or surgery, or radiation. Wouldn’t that be nice? No. From “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” back to Orwell’s “1984”, back further to Goethe’s “Faust”, the cultural message is clear. There is always a sinister motive behind this gift of the good life. The bad guys want to rob your freedom in exchange for some fleeting and ultimately worthless promise of fame, fortune, and good-looking playmates. It’s the Devil’s pact. All brainwashing is bad.

Herman Cain wants to be taken seriously. Let’s listen to exactly what he said. “Many African Americans have been brainwashed into not being open-minded, not even considering a conservative point of view. I have received some of that same vitriol, simply because I am running for the Republican nomination as a conservative. So it’s just brainwashing and people not being open-minded, pure and simple …. For two-thirds of them that is the case.”

The brainwashers are the usual Republican devils: liberals or Democrats, if there is any difference. According to Cain, most African Americans are unable to escape the mind-control black magic of those long-time political criminals, led by their Brainwasher-in-Chief, Barack Obama.

A slightly different metaphor comes to the lips of another black conservative, Rep. Allen West from Florida. He compares the Democratic Party to a modern-day “plantation.”

West told Laura Ingraham on FOX News that he is the “modern-day Harriet Tubman“ and that he wants to lead fellow African Americans away from the “21st-century plantation.” Only this time, unlike 19th-century slavery, African Americans voted eagerly for their slave masters. Dumb.

Are Cain and West actually trying to appeal to African Americans by calling them dupes? Certainly. That’s no different than the message proclaimed by all the Republican Presidential competitors. The new line, once put out only by celebrity radicals, like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, but now standard fare for serious Republican politicians, is that liberals are not simply wrong, not simply bad for the country, but determined to ruin America. Bad for blacks and whites, if only they could see it.

The evil deeds of Obama Democrats, like the hoax of global warming, the death panel threat to Grandma, and the betrayal of Israel, are so obvious, that the only explanation for their legions of avid supporters is brainwashing.

These European-style socialists constantly repeat their big lies through the dishonest liberal media. Using techniques perfected by Joseph Goebbels, the American media bombards the public with so many “facts”, that only conservatives have not been put into a trance.

Sounds like “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man,” as Joseph McCarthy said long ago.

Herman Cain is just repeating normal Republican campaign rhetoric. But there is still a difference. White American is pretty evenly divided, with the edge to the right-thinking conservatives. But Cain’s two-thirds of black America, which is really 90% of black voters in 2010, blindly votes for Democrats.

It seems to me that a better tactic to win black votes might be to offer more than insults, such as jobs (African Americans had 13% unemployment in 2010) or health care (44% of black adults have no health insurance). But not one Republican politician has repudiated Cain’s and West’s characterization of black Americans.

Perry and Romney and all the rest agree that African Americans are less able than whites to resist the clever techniques of the liberal brainwashers. Born that way, I guess.

About Steve Hochstadt

Steve Hochstadt is professor of history at Illinois College in Jacksonville, Illinois, and author of Sources of the Holocaust (2004) and Exodus to Shanghai: Stories of Escape from the Third Reich (2012), both from Palgrave Macmillan. He writes a weekly column for the Jacksonville (IL) Journal-Courier and blogs for the History News Network. "His latest work is presented at www.stevehochstadt.com."

The Body Politic

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